Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Cambridge


Curves

Shopfronts are not the most obvious items in the cornucopia that is the architecture of Cambridge, but here is one that pulled me up short as I walked around the town in the rain last week. My first response to this building in Market Street was a question: could this really be an original art nouveau frontage? The glorious collection of curves described by its carved woodwork certainly seemed to point that way and I guessed that it was late art nouveau, a survival from perhaps the early 1920s. When I got home and looked it up, I found that the building's official listing put it at c 1910, whereas Kathryn A Morrison in her excellent English Shops and Shopping dates it to c 1923, when the front was made for Stetchworth Dairies.


The front repays a close look. The woodwork above the door is a stunning collection of stylized foliage and multiple curves that turn back on themselves in a way that we're now more used to seeing in Paris or Brussels than in England and the flowers and stems in the glass echo these curves beautifully. The door and the wooden panels on either side take up the theme of curves too, as does the extraordinary metalwork.


The building must have made a remarkable diary. The front seems to have been designed to catch the eye more effectively than the display of eggs, cream, butter, and cheese in the window. If it's not perhaps as effective in its new role fronting a gift shop (it seems to cry out for a more sensitive sign than the one currently in place), at least it is in use, a curvaceous and exotic reminder of the skill with which which shops were designed and fitted out in the days when frontages like this were made to last.

11 comments:

James Russell said...

Lovely! I don't remember Cambridge being particularly blessed with interesting shops, so this was definitely a find. I always wonder with this kind of shop where the money came from to make the front so beautiful... Thanks

Philip Wilkinson said...

James: Thank you. A good poinbt about the money, which has struck me too. My impression, from looking at the changing architecture of shop fronts, is that past shop owners (before the 1960s and 1970s perhaps) put much more of their display budget into shop fronts, which they wanted to last. So, although the expense was high, a front would last decades and the owner would hope to be in business, selling basically the same thing, for decades too. So, although this art nouveau frontage must once have stood out (even in 1923) as something new-looking, that was not the whole point, it was also intended to look good for a long time into the future. Even so, this carved wooden dairy frontage would, I'm sure, have been seen as something special - a symbol of quality, if you like.

Nowadays things tend to be different. A lot of the basic structure of the frontage is likely to be made of standardized components, and the money is put into frequently changing signs that reflect current fashion and (in the case of multiples and chains) new corporate identities.

James Russell said...

Yes, presumably the average dairy was rather more modest! This was for Gown rather than Town...

Philip Wilkinson said...

Gown, absolutely.

Mind you, there were some pretty elaborate dairies in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. I posted one a while back in North London, which, if I can remember how to do links properly, will be here.

Hels said...

I know most of the shops in Cambridge. Even in my impoverished days when I could only afford to look and not buy! So this Old dairy shop is a bit of a surprise. Was it every altered or covered over, between 1923 and 1993?

Philip Wilkinson said...

Hels: I don;t know the answer to this. The listing was done in 1996, and Kathryn Morrison's book is more recent than that, so I have no source for the building from the time you were in Cambridge. It would not have been easy to cover the art nouveau carving without concealing most of the frontage, though.

Philip Wilkinson said...

..also, your question makes me wonder what is under the fascia board.

sam said...

The woodwork looks like new. i believe old-time architects were amazing in their creativity.

Philip Wilkinson said...

Sam: Yes, and the carvers were good too!

Roy said...

During my time living in Cambridge (1970-1985) I have a fairly strong recollection of reading about the 'discovery' of this shopfront underneath substantial modern cladding that gave no clue to the treasures that lay beneath.

The article would have been in The Cambridge Evening News, so a search of their archives - or of The Cambridgeshire Collection - would probably yield further info.

Philip Wilkinson said...

Roy: Thank you very much - that's fascinating.